


The Adventures of Mad Sweeney and Long Lankin

by darkandstormyslash



Category: American Gods (TV), American Gods - Neil Gaiman
Genre: Death, Gen, Swearing, Violence, old faeries with old notions about how acceptable everything is, stabbings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-15
Updated: 2017-11-24
Packaged: 2019-02-02 22:02:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 6,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12735198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkandstormyslash/pseuds/darkandstormyslash
Summary: A mad Irish leprechaun and a psychopathic English bogeyman make their way through American history. I did a ton of research to try and get the history and geography mostly right - but please comment if you notice anything way out of whack.Now finished!





	1. Austria has chosen war

It’s a cloudy evening in July 1914, and it’s the first time Mad Sweeney hears of the war in Europe. He’s loitering around in Washington, only been in the city two weeks but already he’s considering leaving, and he spots a newspaper seller trying to get rid of the last few copies of the day. The headline is emblazoned loud and bold on the front:

_Austria has chosen war_

Well it would, wouldn’t it? Sweeney furrows his brow and tries to remember if Austria is close to France. He can’t for the life of him remember. He watches as the newspaper seller manages to hawk one off to a hurrying man in a suit and then waves the final one around desultorily, clearly considering whether to give it up for the evening. Sweeney flicks a coin out from his sleeve and levers himself off the side of the wall. He’s about to go and buy it, a good deed in a naughty world, but then he spots another man approaching. Spots him in an instant, because Mad Sweeney might not be the sharpest blade in the night but he’s no fool. He’s seen them before, the English Faerie Court, and this lad might as well have just stepped off the boat, pale and shining that he is.

The newspaper-seller appears not to notice. Maybe he just sees a tall man in a green jacket, his white shirt unbuttoned, his pale white hair curling around to frame a face just as pale, with a narrow chin and deep-set eyes. A coin of silver slides out from between long slender fingers and the newspaper seller hands the last paper across, doffs his cap and walks away whistling.

The faerie watches him go, eyes narrowed. Sweeney saunters over. “Not thinking of killing him are you? After he did you a favour?”

The faerie turns to face him, and that’s when Sweeney realises that it probably _isn’t_ a faerie. Not technically. Same mould, same breed, same fashion, but a different stuff inside. It isn’t a human, he can tell that much, maybe some kind of ghost or bogey, a story from the old country that travelled over in the heart and mind of a weary traveller.

“Piss off.” It snaps at him.

“War, eh?” Sweeney nods at the paper because honest to heaven he hasn’t had a conversation with anything non-human in _years_ and at the moment even some snappy English not-quite-faerie will do.

“There’s always war.” This is a mortal creature but, Sweeney realises, it isn’t an old one. This isn’t a goblin or brownie from the ancient rhymes, this is something relatively new, from an England ruled by a German King and rich powerful men in powdered wigs. “War in France, War in Austria, War in India. They’ll get involved, you’ll see, Big John Bull with his big stomping boots and his big flintlock pistols. It’s Austria now, it’ll be England tomorrow.”

“Who are you?” Sweeney asks, finally curious enough. He’s been trying to place this creature because he does know most of the Faerie Court what with one thing and another, most of the wanderers and travellers as well, but this is something very new, even for him.

He gets a cursory glance for his trouble. “You’ll be Suibhne then.”

“You’ve heard of me?”

“I’ve heard of you. Heard of all of you. You heard of me? Lankin, they call me, or close enough to that.”

Sweeney frowns and thinks, then finally shakes his head, “Never heard of you. From the Court?”

Lankin sniggers. It’s an unpleasant sound, “With the Lords and Ladies? Oh no. I’m new.”

“Not here you’re not.” Sweeney gives a disdainful gesture that seems to take in most of Washington and, he hopes, the America that lies beyond it. “Here you’re old. Here anything that’s been around for longer than 20 years is old. This place moves.”

“I’m used to movement.” Lankin’s mouth twists upwards. Young and cocky, Sweeney thinks, something that’s crawled out of rural folktales just in time to be whisked away to the growing industrial cities. “Used to change. You’re old money, Suibhne, a golden sovereign in a silver world.”

“Didn’t think they still made silver coins.” Sweeney says mildly, and is delighted when it provokes a flash of irritation, “How long have you been here?”

Lankin squints at the date on the front of the newspaper, “How long? About 60 years.”

“Not getting any better is it? This isn’t a good country for us.”

“Too many lights.” Lankin sneers it with sudden venom. “Too many _fucking_ lights, they’re obsessed with it. Even their God is light, he’s made of it. Lights on the buildings, on the streets, how can they live with so much light around?”

“Too many lights.” Sweeney agrees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case anyone was interested, here's the front page of the newspaper: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/08/9f/fe/089ffe6b7c3e0835c6bd864cd0b3d45e.jpg
> 
> What Mad Sweeney is doing in Washington is anyone's guess.


	2. The Tale of Long Lankin

_Said my lord to his lady as he mounted his horse:_

_'Beware of Long Lankin that lives in the moss'_

_Said my lord to his lady as he rode away:_

_'Beware of Long Lankin that lives in the hay.'_

Once upon a time there was a stone-mason.

Once upon a time there was a miller.

Once upon a time there was a leper.

Who was Long Lankin? He was all of those, he was none of those. Stories have no truth, they hold only fiction, and in fiction the truth can twist and change and reflect a million facts.

The _truth_ is that while 1775 kicked off the struggle for Independence in a faraway colony, back at home it was also the date that the British Parliament passed the Enclosure Acts. This allowed moneyed landlords to stake fences across the land, turning small fields into big fields, turning wasteland into farm.

What of the people who’d worked on the small fields? What of the folk who’d gathered wood on the wastelands? What of them.

What has this to do with Long Lankin? Perhaps everything, perhaps nothing.

The story goes that the Lord left his Lady alone in the house. The story goes that he told her to beware of a stone-mason unpaid, of a devil-man in the night, of a leper roaming the moors. The story says that one evening Lankin crept into the house, aided by an evil nursemaid, and killed the Lady and her child.

_Here's blood in the kitchen. Here's blood in the hall_

_Here's blood in the parlour where my lady did fall._

The story says the nurse was sentenced to death; either burnt as a witch or hung as a criminal. Lankin’s fate changed in each re-iteration of the tale. Often he was threatened with death, less often was he caught. Sometimes he hung himself, a bloodied corpse twitching in the moonlight, other times he was hunted down by dogs and men and torn apart.

Did Lankin ever die? Did he ever live? The housewives shook their keys in the evenings to call the children home “Lankin’s a-coming! Get indoors now.” Sometimes he was seen, a ghostly figure on the moors, a pale spirit inducing frightful hysterics and a raft of attention and excitement around anyone who had glimpsed it. The more the stories are told, the more the stories change.

The truth is that by 1775 there were plenty of rich men who owned large plots of land having displaced or paid off the tenants who worked there. The truth is that wherever there is money there is guilt, wherever there is guilt there is fear, and wherever there is fear there are stories. Stories of an unpaid man who’ll sneak in to an unguarded house. Stories of the leper bent on bathing in innocent blood. Stories of the disenfranchised and cast out, and the guilt that gnaws away in all who ignore them.

When Lisa Bramwell the nursemaid crossed the Atlantic in 1847 she decided she did not like this new country. The air was wrong, the smells were wrong, the soil was wrong. She watched over three children for her master and mistress and called them in every night with a clank of her keys, across the gardens of the big house with its strange roof, “Lankin’s a-coming!”

Lisa Bramwell was arrested in 1856 for neglect of duty when the three children were taken from the family home along with all of the silverware. There was no sign of a forced entry or break in. One body was later recovered, behind a bush in the garden, stabbed through multiple times by what looked like a long needle-like implement. The other two were never found.

The air was wrong. The soil was wrong. But a bogeyman born of wealthy guilt and fear put down roots and grew in a country with plenty of both.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case anyone was wondering, this is who Lankin is. I first heard of him as a small child listening to Steeleye Span, which means he comes from that strange folk-rock era where everything seems old but is actually lemon-scented new. Ancient-crystals-as-practiced-since-1960 sort of thing. The actual poem I've used isn't quite the Steeleye Span one, and isn't quite the Child's version, it's somewhere in the middle.
> 
> Mind you, the Child Ballads were meant to be 'ancient English folktales' when they were written and most of them can only be traced back to around 1600.
> 
> The link between the Lankin poem and the enclosures act is entirely made up, as all good stories are.


	3. Lips That Touch Liquor

Lankin’s right, in the end, the war doesn’t stop at Austria. It sweeps across Europe, and then rather alarmingly comes over to the New World as well. Sweeney moves back up to New York and lies low, he’s a big burly man of the right age to be drafted and it’s only his lack of paperwork that prevents him from being called up. It doesn’t stop him getting funny looks though, because it’s hard for a big bloke with shockingly red hair to lie low at the best of times. He drinks and fights, and at some point he’s pretty sure the war finishes – or at least pauses for a while because when do wars ever actually finish?

It’s Lankin who first finds him and tells him the news. He’s bedding down in a warehouse in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan, on the basis that an unemployed drunk Irishman is less likely to stand out there. He isn’t really in the mood to be woken, particularly not to get an irritating English bogeyman’s boot between his ribs and a hiss of “Wake up.”

“Let me get some fekkin’ sleep.”

“Up. Get up.”

“What the –“ Sweeney scrubs at his eyes and squints at Lankin, in a vest and frayed trousers that looked like they’ve been made, badly, out of sackcloth, “What the hell are you doing in New York?”

“Looking for you. They’ve banned alcohol.”

“They’ve what?” It’s too early to process statements like that, and Sweeney hasn’t been particularly up on politics lately. “I thought that was a joke.”

“It’s real. Very real. And I was thinking where do I know a big Paddy lout with a lot of luck who can take advantage of that?”

Sweeney groans and yanks a few coins from the horde, throwing them in Lankin’s general direction. “There. Coins. Do with them what you will.”

“I don’t want money.” Lankin steps closer, giving him another prod with his boot. “You want alcohol and I want to kill people. Come on. We can use this.”

“Why me?” But Sweeney knows, without even asking. The same thing that had driven him to talk to Lankin in the first place the same thing that would drive him, many years later, to talk to Wednesday. It's lonely, living in the twilight space between men and gods, wrapped in immortality tight enough to choke.

Still, it doesn’t make him any less grumpy about being woken up. “How can they ban drink? They might as well ban breathing.”

“You’d think they’d only ban it for the poor, but no. Gone for everyone.” Lankin watches as Sweeney finally pulls himself into an upright and half-respectable position. “You look like shite.”

Sweeney looks him up blearily up and down, “You look shit and all.”

They get a barge, eventually, and row it back and forth across the Hudson with liquor on board, bickering all the while. They’re lucky enough to find a good supplier, lucky enough to slip past the guards night after night, lucky enough to get clouds that cover the moon.

Lucky Sweeney, they start to call him, Lucky Sweeney and his associate – a pale man with an untraceable accent and stiletto knives that gleam silver in the darkness. Because sometimes, even Sweeney admits, it has nothing to do with luck, and everything to do with a pale figure who appears in the evening and vanishes in the night, leaving nothing behind but a drip-drip of blood and a stench of fear.

They cart the barrels out to a warehouse, slipping them down into a cellar. They very rarely see who collects them. The payment is left outside; a sack of coins, crisp dollar bills, sometimes gemstones, sometimes food.

Sweeney laughs, unwrapping the food and biting into a hunk of bread, “Look at that, almost belief isn’t it? Good enough, for sure.”

Long Lankin wipes his needle-knives clean on the sackcloth and smiles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This, bizarrely enough, is the chapter that started in my head. Mad Sweeney during the prohibition. I had to look up where Manhattan was and it turns out I've spent 29 years of my life thinking it was Long Island.


	4. Boom and Bust

New York isn’t Lankin’s favourite place. He’s a country-thing, a bogeyman of mist and moors and darkness. The smoke that curls over the docks isn’t good enough, not really, and city-darkness is never the same as countryside darkness. There’s always a light somewhere, sparking and shining and glimmering, making him hiss and curse. The countryside is deep-dark, not the dark of switched off lights, but the dark where lights can never reach.

But while Sweeney’s here, and the action is here, he’s happy to stay. Besides, he’s _been_ into the countryside here and it’s not right, it’s just not right. It’s too big, too open. Wide empty grasslands that stretch out for miles and miles. The only thing that should be that big, in Lankin’s opinion, is the ocean. It's ridiculous to have a block of land that big.

They continue to sail their barge back and forth across the Hudson, taking advantage of the eager city's desire for alcohol. The day the markets crash to the ground like a castle made of glass Lankin is quietly exultant, pacing along the moored-up barge as he tries to glimpse the future. “This’ll put the fox in the henhouse, Sweeney. Life’s no fun if everyone can be rich. There’s no tension, no struggle, they have no class here, Sweeney, it gets on my tits. What this place needs is a rock solid bulk of people who know they’ll never have any chance at all in life. That’d brighten things up.”

Sweeney gives an ugly bark of laughter, “You think those people don’t exist? You’re looking in the wrong places.”

“This is the land of opportunity for everyone.” Lankin spits the words out, and Sweeney laughs again, but more easily. Lankin still annoys him more than anything else, but they’ve been together for a good few years now, long enough to know each other, long enough to work with each other. He knows the things Lankin craves, and he’s starting to understand the things that, for this rotten little psychopathic half-faerie, count as worship.

He pats the side of the barge and gives a sigh, “I’ll tell you one thing, Lankin, this’ll be the end of this little venture. They’ll bring the booze back after this.”

“No they won’t. You don’t just reverse the law. Laws move onwards and upwards.”

“They’ll reverse this one.” Sweeney squints down the river towards Wall Street. “Nobody’ll want to be sober at a time like this.”

Lankin makes a face and Sweeney can tell that this is the beginning of the end. Sure as the tide is sliding out, prohibition will be reversed and when it is there won’t be a need for a couple of low-life roughs with a whiskey barge, an easy approach to bartering, and a few sharp knives in the dark. He has a feeling somewhere deep inside that with no excuse to keep them together Lankin and him will be forced to split up, both too proud to admit that they need each other for reasons that go beyond the business.

The tide starts to turn and Sweeney sighs, resting his arm against the barge-pole and nodding at the lights across the river, “One more, eh? One more for luck?”

“One more for Lucky Sweeney.” Lankin hesitates and for a moment Sweeney thinks he’s about to suggest something new, some new scheme they can get into when the bootlegging business goes south. The mood he’s in right now if Lankin suggests something he’ll probably agree to it, and that will keep the two of them thrown together far beyond the natural lifetime of their friendship. They need to move on, he realises, even if it’s a sad realisation. They’re two different beings, from two different worlds, and the center cannot hold.

He pushes the barge-pole into the water and gives it a shove. Whatever scheme Lankin might have been about to divulge is lost as the boat rocks sideways and Long Lankin tumbles over into the bilges in a heap of ugly swearing.


	5. The Grapes Are Pissed

You can’t separate people from land. People _are_ land. They live on it, live in it, live from it. Even the ones in the city know, deep inside their bones, that they should be closer to the land, to the soil, to the earth their bones are made of.

But the land is unforgiving. The people come, with their new shiny God – a God of reason, of devotion, of love. They forget the old tricksters, they forget _why_ they told the stories of the old tricksters. They tame the world with electric lights and heavy machinery, and they try to tame the land.

This land is _bad_.

Lankin stops work when the sky turns orange, digging his shovel into the bad earth and looking up. Dust, always dust, it lives in the sky now like the land has risen up and taken flight. Which is pretty much, Lankin supposes, what the land has done. Without the knotted grass to tie it down, the land is escaping, swept up into the wind and seeking a future elsewhere.

The red sky grows darker, and Lankin sighs, tugs his bandana up over his mouth, and picks up his shovel. There’s a small rickety lean-to at the side of the farm made of corrugated iron and the noise it makes when the wind blasts into it is deafening. Lankin lives in it because nobody else wants to go anywhere near it.

(There was a child, ten years ago or more, who they say died there – beaten to death with an iron rod by an angry stepfather. It’s pretty tenuous, but Lankin is in no mood to be choosy).

The storm doesn’t clear, it never clears nowadays, but the wind dies down after a while and Lankin ventures back out. The dust still hangs in the air, red and cloying, and the ground is now covered in a layer of it. It gives the farm a strange otherworldly look, not helped by the small skinny figure now crouching in the corner of the field. Lankin stares at it for a long while then picks up his shovel, swings it onto his shoulder, and goes to take a look.

He recognises who it is as he gets closer and raises a surprised eyebrow. Unexpected, but also not really all that unexpected.

“Robin?”

The figure looks up. It’s wearing a pair of patched and faded dungarees clearly made for a person several sizes larger. The material hangs off and around the frame, which is so thin as to be almost skeletal. The eyes are large and bulging slightly in the head, and Lankin suddenly feels a wave of pity for the thing. A bad pity, the kind of pity that takes a gun behind the woodshed. This is Puck, Robin Goodfellow, a little English Sprite all alone in a bad land and a bad place and Lankin wants to bash its brains out to rid the world of the horrible injustice that has brought the thing here.

Puck squints back at him. “Who’s you then?”

The voice is pinched and high-pitched, breathless and rasping with the dust from the land. Lankin tries to keep some of the disgust off his face. “Long Lankin of the Moor.”

Puck gives a sniff, smelling him, testing the air.

“Are you here alone?” Lankin asks.

Sad round eyes look up at him. It isn’t right, Lankin thinks, Puck should be teasing and playful, the court-jester, the trickster. Out here he’s just a lost lonely soul in a land playing the cruellest trick of all. “Yes. All alone. I thought – I thought there would be something, out here. Farms and farmers, countryside.”

Puck had come out in search of dingley dells and little rivers and forests. Instead he’d found an endless sea of grass that had been scratched to death by a thousand farmhands. He’d come in search of the easy, embracing love of the land and instead found only desperation and hardship.

“You can’t stay here.” Lankin says.

Puck nods. The wind whips up briefly and the two of them watch as a little dust tornado curls lazily across the field before collapsing down apathetically. “Got somewhere to go I have.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere’s new.”

New. It’s all about the new. Lankin has seen a lot of new in his life; new industries, new thoughts, new philosophies, new governments. But somethings never change, rock-solid things like fear and wealth and guilt and hate. The people in this land are beyond desperate now, searching for a way out while around them the doors are locked. They head to the cities in search of a better life that will never exist and there, Lankin knows, is where he’ll get his blood sacrifice. When the desperate beat at the doors of the wealthy, and the wealthy pull up the drawbridge.

“Been old for so long.” Puck murmurs wistfully. “There’s a place, _she said_ , there is. Out west. A place where they have magic.”

Lankin doesn’t like this. He can’t quite say why but he doesn’t like it one bit.

“Magic…” Puck repeats and his eyes sparkle. “Magic, and jealousy, and glamour. A place with violent delights, desire and love that vanishes with the dew. A place of illusions and dreams. They call it … Holly Wood.”

“You can’t live on dreams.” Lankin scoffs.

Something flashes dark in Puck’s eyes, “ _I_ can. They’re all going west here, they are. Can take a ride.”

Lankin squints at the sky, trying to see where West is. He can’t even see the sun, just a haze of light that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere.

“Will you come?”

Lankin shakes his head. It’s been good out here, and he’s always been intrigued by what lies Westwards, but he needs a bit of security. He’s starting to feel a strange kind of longing homesickness for a certain island. An island where the richest street in the world rubs up against the poorest ghettos, an island with a perfect rectangle of countryside trapped inside a looming crush of city. Not the island he came from, but an island that, surprisingly, he’s starting to think of as home.

“I’ve had enough of this bloody dust.” Lankin grumbles, “Might head back to New York.”

Puck frowns, “What is there for you in New York?”

Lankin smiles with all his teeth, “A friend.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been wanting to introduce Puck for ages, but he didn't fit in New York and so the poor guy got stuck into the dust bowl. I got about halfway through the chapter and suddenly realised that while I loved him, I had no idea what to do with him, so I left the story alone and went for a shower. I was working through the next few chapters in my head wondering what point in the story I should introduce the New Gods, and as soon as I thought of Media, Puck jumped up in my head and went. "Hollywood sounds like a Puck place to me. It's even called Holly Wood. I wanna go." 
> 
> I think Puck would have a ball in Hollywood.


	6. You can't fight in here

There’s another riot in New York, on a miserable afternoon in 1968, and Sweeney gets fed up enough to go and look for Lankin. They’re half in touch, but they aren’t exactly close, and it’s turning to evening when Sweeney finally tracks him down. Lankin is sitting on a street corner beside an empty oil-drum gutting a fish with a long thin knife. Sweeney watches Lankin trying to avoid catching his eye for a few minutes before growing bored and flicking a coin at him. It bounces off the side of the oil-drum and Lankin flinches.

“If you want money.” Sweeney says, “You just have to ask.”

“I don’t want money.”

“This is a prosperous place, you know, big rich city.”

“Not for everyone.”

Sweeney comes over and leans against the wall next to him. Lankin is wearing a pair of tight trousers and a knitted sweater with no shirt underneath, and apparently this is enough to keep him warm in the chilly autumn air. His grey fingerless gloves glimmer in the low light while the knife works its way into the fish's guts. “You’ve even got the teachers rioting. Teachers. Rioting. What are you planning?”

“I’m not planning anything. Just joining in, you know me.”

They work best together, Sweeney has realised in the last decade or so, when they don’t work together. Manhattan is wide enough for both Lankin and him to coexist reasonably peacefully and it’s nice, sometimes, to have someone to grab a drink with in the evenings. Dirty and impoverished and irritatingly English though Lankin is, at least he's here, in the city, a single constant in a changing world.

There’s a certain point though, at which even Sweeney has had enough. “There is garbage in the streets.”

Lankin goes back to gutting his fish with a smirk.

“Rubbish.” Sweeney gestures wildly around. “There are bags and bags of fekking rubbish, Lankin. All over the streets!”

“I didn’t put it there.”

“Well you can fucking get rid of it.”

When they go drinking, Sweeney drinks hard, and when Sweeney drinks hard, Sweeney fights. Lankin sometimes joins in, but Lankin fights in a very different way. Sweeney fights big – all swinging fists and snarling swearwords. Lankin doesn’t swing punches, he _avoids_ punches. Boots and fists land in the empty spaces where Lankin suddenly isn’t, and Lankin will keep sliding out of the way until he gets bored or irritated enough to stab a knife into someone.

“You fight,” Sweeney grumbles, “The way people do tax returns. Can’t you enjoy it?”

“There’s nothing particularly enjoyable about fighting.”

“I thought you were all about violence!”

Lankin rolls his eyes, “This isn’t violence, it’s just drunken brawling. You’re not even trying to hurt each other, really.”

“I was trying to hurt that fucker last week.”

“The only person you’re trying to hurt when you fight, Mad Sweeney, is yourself.” Lankin snaps, and Mad Sweeney doesn’t even dignify that with a reply because honestly, he’s never heard anything so ridiculous in his life.

They make a pact, at some point in the years after their new adopted city crawls out of yet another massive European War, to try a different bar together each time they go out. By the summer of 1969 they’ve worked their way down to Lower Manhattan, in a sketchy crazy neighbourhood where Lankin slopes them into some fancy-bar and buys them a drink. Sweeney stands with his back to the wall and twitches slightly.

“Uncomfortable?” Lankin asks, passing over something that’s too frothy to be beer.

“Not my scene.” Some brash dark young man with silver dust in his hair gives Sweeney an appraising look and he gives a curt little shake of the head back. “This is hardly a place for a brawl.”

“You don’t think so?” Nobody is bothering Lankin. Even in the emptiest bar he has a way of making eyes slide off him, and this place is packed. Or maybe its because he’s standing next to Sweeney, who is tall and red-haired and muscular and starting to regret coming out in just a vest.

There’s a crowd around the bar that Sweeney decides, despite the profusion of silk and taffeta dresses, cannot all be labelled as women. There’s the sound of gossip and laughter. The only scuffles in this place are happening quietly and eagerly in the bathrooms, or in the darker sections of the bar. It’s not a bad place, he has to grudgingly admit, he’s just not sure why they’re here. It seems to be a place where men come exclusively to pick up other men, and there’s no good beer.

Lankin’s eyes bore into his, and Sweeney knows they’re waiting for something.

It’s three hours later when, in the Stonewall Inn down the road, the first stone is flung. And Sweeney knows that Long Lankin will never in his immortal lifetime forgive himself for sitting all evening in the _wrong damn bar_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The chapter title is from the fantastic Cold War dark satire Dr. Strangelove Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb: "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!". It's one of my favourite movie quotes ever.
> 
> I think around the time of the 60s-70s Long Lankin might have attempted to style himself as a kind of God of Riots. But he doesn't really have the drive or organisational power to make it work.
> 
> Gay Bars really aren't Mad Sweeney's scene.


	7. Reaganomics

They say blood is thicker than water, but Lankin knows that only really applies to old blood. New blood _spurts_ , all over the place if there’s nothing to stop it, running as bright and clear as a mountain stream in red. It’s only old blood that’s thick; viscous and slow, trickling down the way that old money doesn’t.

Mad Sweeney has left New York. He’s gone to some place in the Midwest that Lankin, in a fit of petty jealousy, refuses to visit. Besides, he’s starting to rather like it here. His island is full of rich and objectionable people getting even richer and more objectionable, while the poor shmucks around them grow poorer and needier. It’s going to be good, he’s got no need to move.

No need to move at all.

The first time he sees Technical Boy the kid is hanging around outside the Federal Hall in an ill-fitting striped suit and a pair of striped suspenders, swearing at a large brick-like mobile phone. Lankin rather likes the Federal Hall, because it's a small squat symbol of the past surrounded by tall looming apartments rising up on either side, keeping it in perpetual shadow. Everything’s so tall nowadays, everything’s involved in a breathless rush upwards – like a sped up motion clip of a twisting vine, shooting up from the earth and out into space.

Technical Boy looks up and spots him, giving a cross little scowl. “What are you looking at?”

“Something new.” Lankin answers, and he’s not sure he likes it.

He sees the glimmer of dawning understanding in Technical Boy’s eyes, as the New God recognises an old one. Just as quickly, it’s covered by an expression that is deeply smug. “Are you one of those Brit ones?”

Long Lankin doesn’t answer.

“Yeah well, welcome to the future, grandad.” The boy seems to think this is a deeply funny statement. Lankin walks closer and stares at him until he stops laughing.

“We found one of you guys.” Technical Boy says, all aggressive, “Media found him, skulking around in Hollywood, some fairy or whatever.”Lankin stays silent and the aggressive look grows more challenging, “You know where he is now? Some stripper bar in Vegas. You can’t cut it here. All that belief you feed off, you don’t have it anymore.”

“You have no idea what I feed off.” Lankin murmurs.

“Whatever it is, people don’t want it anymore. They want this.” The boy shoves the large portable telephone into his face, “They want us.”

“They want you, oh yes they want you.” Lankin can’t remember the last time he felt this angry. “But they _need_ us.”

“Nobody needs you.” Technical Boy tries to shove past him, but Lankin grabs the front of his stupid striped suspenders, yanking him close and feeling a satisfied thrill as the boy looks momentarily panicked.

“Look at you, all Greed is Good and Money Never Sleeps – you think you invented this shit? Corporate billionaires and trillionaires and massive tasteless mansions with exploited labour? Greed was old when I was new, and you’ll be a dead worn-out husk before it dies.”

“Get off!” Lankin lets him go and the boy staggers backwards, still with a sneer on his face. “You don’t get it, do you? You’re still caught up in all those emotions, all those stupid weak illogical things. This isn’t about greed, it’s about information; the most valuable commodity there is. Information controls the world and this,” the brick-like phone gets shoved in Lankin’s face again, “Controls the information.”

Lankin stares at the phone. He can almost see it starting to crack, cracking open like an egg and birthing out a whole new era.

“These are the future, _this_ is the future. A future of pure information. Super-information highways, this is where it’s going, Daddy-O.”

“I know about highways.” Lankin responds, his voice old and rasping at the edges. He puts it on even further, the crypt-keeper giving a dire warning, because he can see it’s starting to freak the boy out, “You know what they have on highways? Toll-booths.”

“No, there won’t be, it’ll just be-“

“Tolls, and barriers, and taxes, and highway men.” Lankin shakes his head. “You think you’re making something new, and you’ll keep thinking that until thousands of years of human greed crashes right on to your super-information-highway and makes a big bloody mess in the middle of it.”

Technical Boy glares at him, and for a moment Lankin rather hopes the kid will try and hit him. Instead he just shrugs, turning away towards the NYSE. “Whatever. Keep thinking you’re relevant.”

“Keep thinking you’re in control.” Lankin answers, but he waits until the boy is out of earshot before he says it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I sloped up and down Wall Street in Google Streetview for this chapter. Technical Boy is going through a Gordon Gekko phase, because that seems like something he would have done.
> 
> This chapter was more influenced by the whole Net Neutrality argument than perhaps it should have been.


	8. Is there anyone out there?

_It’s the year two thousand is there anyone out there?_

_If you’re from another planet put your hands in the air._

Mad Sweeney greets the dawning of the new millennium on a cheap hotel bed, with his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth and the mother of all hangovers. A searing pounding headache is building up behind his eyes and as he rolls over blearily it jolts down to his stomach.

He staggers out of bed, giving a groan as he accidentally steps on the sleeping Lankin, lying half under the bed and looking equally disheveled. Lankin gives a hiss and mutters archaic curses at him and Sweeney staggers over him and heads to the bathroom.

“Fucking hell, I think I’m going to die.”

“Die quietly.”

Sweeney finally gets into the bathroom, collapsing beside the toilet, trying blearily to remember where is he, why Lankin's here with him, and whether he’s drunk anything non-alcoholic in the last 48 hours. “God the last time I was this drunk I sold my shoes to a raven.”

“Stop. Talking. You. Mad. Irish. Bog-fucker.”

It takes a couple more hours until Sweeney feels able to move from the bathroom, swaying back towards the bed with a groan and landing on top of Lankin who, in the interviewing time, has managed to pull himself into it. There’s a lot more swearing, some of it in a language that hasn’t been heard since the last millennium, before they finally sort themselves back into two separate entities, both grumpy and hungover.

“Where the fuck are we?” Sweeney asks.

“Washington DC.”

“Why?”

“Because you said, you said, ‘We should go and tell the President it’s the new Millennium.’” Lankin manages with some difficulty.

“Did I say that?” Mad Sweeney has a vague and uneasy memory of it.

“Yes.”

“And you listened?”

Lankin is silent for a bit before he finally answers, “I was bored.”

“Shit.” Mad Sweeney stares at the ceiling, feeling the weight of Lankin next to him. “Well, did we meet the President?”

“We did not.”

Sweeney gives a snort of laughter. “I’m sure he noticed it, anyway, they made enough noise. A thousand years, eh? I bet there’s plenty of people feeling old this morning.”

“Plenty feeling hungover as well.” Lankin groans.

“This is a New Millennium hangover, this’ll be lasting a good ten years I reckon.” Sweeney manages to haul himself out of the bed and stagger towards the minibar, opening it up. “Ten years of everyone feeling miserable and fucked. Bugger, this fridge is still cold. Didn’t they say all the electricity was going to stop?”

“Hasn’t it?” Lankin answers from under a pillow.

“No.” Sweeney grabs a tiny whiskey for himself and then throws a tiny gin onto the bed next to Lankin. “There you go.”

“I was hoping it would. Put a wrench in that stupid little fucker’s plans. He offered me a job, you know, that Technical Kid.” Lankin’s hand gropes out to grab at the tiny gin bottle “Do you know what he told me?  _“It’s all about the haves and the have-nots, isn’t it? That’s your thing. But we’re offering the haves everything, everything in their wildest dreams. Don’t you want to be part of that dream?_ ” Wanker.”

“Yeah.” Sweeney answers, feeling something drop in the pit of his stomach. “Did you take the job?”

Lankin pushes himself upright, unscrewing the top of the gin bottle and tipping it down his throat. He doesn’t answer immediately, which tells Sweeney all he needs to know.

“Shit. Traitor.”

“C’mon Sweeney…”

“You fucking useless traitor.” Sweeney’s mostly angry about the fact that he can’t even bring himself to blame Lankin. So Lankin’s a stooge for the new gods, and Sweeney’s a stooge for the old ones but somehow it doesn’t feel like they’re on different sides. “I hope you vomit your kidneys out.”

Lankin gives a shrug, then digs around in the pocket of his jeans, pulling out a crumpled plane ticket, “I’m meant to be going there this afternoon. Silicon Valley. They’ve got a little tech bubble.”

Sweeney looks at the crumpled ticket and snorts, “I know what you and your knives do to bubbles, Mister Lankin.”

Lankin gives a modest grin.

Sweeney sighs and pushes the ticket back towards him. “Go on, get out of here. Take a shower and iron your jeans and piss off.”

He closes his eyes, and therefore doesn’t see Lankin smile, but he feels the bed dip and a few moments later the shower starts to run. Sweeney opens his eyes again and peeks at the ticket on the bed. Long Lankin of the Moor, joining the kids in Silicon Valley. If he remembers rightly, Lankin has a very _direct_ way of dealing with innocent young things.

Virgin blood, and open doors. Oh yes, they change and adapt.

“Kill a kid for me then.” He murmurs at the ticket, then gives a groan and rolls over backwards, waiting for his hangover to pass.

 

_Beware the moss, beware the moor_

_Beware of Long Lankin_

_Make sure the doors are bolted shut_

_Lest Lankin should creep in_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So they finish up in Washington where they started. This story didn't really have an ending when I began it, so I'm really quite chuffed that it managed to work its way into a little completed story. Thanks to Doll and the amazing comment that gave my ego the impetus to write the final three chapters all in one day.
> 
> I'm not saying the dot-com bubble burst of 2000-2002 was caused by a vengeful psychopathic bogeyman. But I'm not saying it wasn't.
> 
> The first two lines of the chapter are from the amazing Dogmanaut 2000 by Frigid Vinegar, which really has to be heard to be believed.


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